Monday, October 10, 2016

The cover of Night Ringing is a photo of forked
lightning, over a mountain, illuminating a broad river. It speaks to the
idea of the book and the title poem, the phone call one receives in the
middle of the night, the "hard to assimilate" news: a mother has had a
stroke, a younger sibling has died suddenly from an aneurysm, a parent
has had a heart attack. The phone ringing, and we are startled awake.

The news is like lightning breaking through the night
sky, carving a human shape across the darkness. It rips us open, rips us
apart, and is the reality of our existence; we are always perched on
the edge of death, our own or our loved ones. It is a terrible truth,
and inescapable. And the image is also beautiful. There is that
contrast, the terror and the beauty.

As it happens, I took this photograph myself, from the
porch of my house overlooking the Connecticut River. I wrote most of the
poems in Night Ringing while living at that house, the river a
constant source of inspiration. For these reasons the photo seemed
appropriate for a cover, and my publisher (Mary Meriam of Headmistress
Press) was enthusiastic. After poetry, photography is for me a
compelling source of creative expression.

Laura Foley is the author of five poetry collections. The Glass Tree won
the Foreword Book of the Year Award, Silver, and was a Finalist for the
New Hampshire Writer’s Project, Outstanding Book of Poetry. Joy Street
won the Bi-Writer’s Award. Her poems have appeared in journals and
magazines including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Inquiring Mind, Pulse
Magazine, Poetry Nook, Lavender Review, The Mom Egg Review and in the
British Aesthetica Magazine. She won Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler
Memorial Poetry Award and the Grand Prize for the Atlanta Review’s
International Poetry Contest.